Digital video recorders (DVRs) allow users to record television programs for later viewing. Typically, users set recording timers to record particular television programs at specified times. The DVR records a particular channel during a specified time slot corresponding with the program, e.g., 7:00 to 8:00. In order to account for programs that start earlier or that end later than the designated time slot, DVRs often start recording earlier or end recording later than the scheduled, time of the program, providing a time buffer of several minutes on each side of the time slot. The additional recording time on either side of a scheduled time slot may be referred to herein as a “time buffer”. For example, the DVR may begin recording at 6:57 for an event scheduled to start at 7:00 and may continue recording until 8:03 if the event is scheduled to end at 8:00. Thus, the DVR does not miss recording the beginning or ending of the program.
In an environment in which a tuner is utilized to record multiple events in adjacent time slots, a DVR is often unable to provide a recording time buffer for one or more of the programs. For example, if the DVR is utilized to record a first program from 6:30 to 7:00 and a second program from 7:00 to 8:00, then there will be no ending time buffer of content in the event file for the first program. Similarly, there will be no beginning time buffer of recording in the event file for the second program. Thus, the event file for a particular program may not include the beginning or ending of the program.
Even when the adjacent time slots are on the same channel, the event files for each program may be missing the beginning or ending of the associated program, which is often located in another event file. Thus, to view a particular program, the user may need to access multiple files, leading to inconvenience to the user. For example, the user may open a first event file and realize that the program was already in progress when the DVR began recording content to the first event file. Thus, the beginning of the program may be contained in a second event file. The user then opens the second event file, watches a minute of two of programming in the second event file to see the beginning of the program and then reopens the first event file to watch the rest of the program. A bigger problem arises if the user does not realize that a program is spread across multiple event files and deletes one of the event files before watching the program, missing out on viewing the beginning or ending of the program contained in the deleted event.